Freud, Reluctant Philosopher

Sigmund Freud held an ambivalent stance toward philosophy. While as a young man he briefly aspired to become a philosopher himself, his later views were marked by scepticism and even disdain. As a medical doctor and a child of the Enlightenment, he sought to operate in a strictly scientific manner, eschewing what he viewed as the metaphysical speculation typical of “the philosophers.” In the practice of his psychoanalytic work, however, he was not always able to uphold his anti-metaphysical principles. Even more ironically, Freud’s psychoanalysis, with its groundbreaking emphasis on the unconscious, had a profound influence on 20th- and 21st-century philosophy, shaping the ideas of thinkers such as Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Adorno, Habermas, and others.